Berluti

One of the most famous photographs of the sixties is "Girls in the Window," Ormond Gigli's picture of 43 women in the windows of a derelict brownstone on East 58th Street. Last night, Berluti's guests filed into the grounds of the Hôtel de Sully to find that creative director Alessandro Sartori had restaged Gigli's photo with 45 male models in the windows of a seventeenth-century mansion in Le Marais. Given the business that Sartori and CEO Antoine Arnault are shaping, the extravagance was appropriate. Proof came moments later when Sartori started enthusing about Berluti's grande mesure, an extraordinary bespoke program that will offer clients the opportunity to order 25 different types of garment, everything from overcoats to chinos. There were appetizers tonight in the form of seven evening outfits, handmade by the atelier Arnys, which Berluti recently acquired. Picture the client for such an endeavor. Not since Cristóbal Balenciaga made everything for Daisy Fellowes, her gardening clothes included…

Such completism is a provocatively sophisticated notion in menswear. Even so, Sartori imagines that, at some point, bespoke will make up a good 10 percent of Berluti's business. But tonight was about the other 90 percent. And, given Berluti's pitch for the uppermost stratum of the luxury market, there were surprises—first and foremost, how casual many of the pieces felt. Sartori said he'd been looking at French workers' uniforms. The cloth co-relative was a cotton drill made from a Japanese indigo cotton yarn that had been bleached before being woven and dyed. It was turned into intensely toned cotton suits that looked like the essence of Sartori's take on the formal/casual connection. The perfect match was the new two-tone shoe, inspired by French municipal workers of the mid-twentieth century.

But Sartori was also proposing a new two-piece suit—a five-button waistcoat with narrow trousers—that was straight out of a vintage Italian movie. Both pants and waistcoats were cut a little short, which left a very funky few inches of shirt showing round the waistband. Above the waist, Sartori was feeling a hybrid shirt-jacket. He insisted this piece had become the center of his wardrobe, though tonight he'd dressed in a hyper-tailored double-breasted suit whose suppressed waist allowed not a millimeter of spare tire. He was, as ever, the best advertisement for his own brand.